CCSO: Henry exaggerated student count; $1M in state funds went to personal use.
Henry
More than $1 million in state funding fraudulently obtained by a Lake City private school went to personal use, including potentially other criminal activity, according to authorities.
A sworn complaint affidavit from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office following a three-month investigation into Tomeka Henry, the 50-year-old owner and operator of Touch By an Angel Learning Academy on N. U.S. Highway 441, said the school exaggerated the number of students in attendance and that the money was not used for “the legitimate operation of the school.”
Henry was arrested Thursday on charges of grand theft and fraud. Two of her sons, Kurtis and Samuel Phillips, were also arrested on unrelated drug and weapons charges after a search of their residence.
According to the affidavit, Touch By An Angel Learning Academy began receiving funding from the Early Learning Coalition of Lake City in February 2020 through its School Readiness Service for 78 children, who were supposedly enrolled at the school.
However, the ELC could only verify 20 of those children’s household’s eligibility through its verified employment process. The affidavit states that while parents of the children were required to provide paystubs as part of the application process, several discrepancies began to show, including several parents reporting Henry or her family provided paystubs so they could qualify for the state funding.
The ELC suspected fraudulent activity and began an investigation, revealing the fraudulent paystubs.
According to the affidavit, during interviews in that investigation, one child was found to also be registered with the Palm Beach Early Learning Coalition. Additionally, multiple children that were claimed to be attending Touch By an Angel were found to be attending other area centers in Columbia and Alachua County with several not even living in Columbia County.
Henry was given a corrective action notice by the ELC on Nov. 24, 2020, for not maintaining proper attendance documentation, the affidavit states. A review of all the school’s attendance records was conducted 16 months later, which showed further issues, including several children not signed in or out at all but still reported as attending. Official attendance numbers for Touch By an Angel didn’t show a single absence from July 2020 through October 2021.
The other source of funding for Henry and TBAA came from Florida’s School Choice program, according to the affidavit. The program is meant for low-income families in order to enroll their kids in a private school.
From 2020 through 2023, Touch By an Angel received $1,423,443 for student scholarships and from the ELC.
According to the affidavit, during surveillance conducted by authorities for a month, there were never more than 11 students ever seen arriving at the school in a single day with an average of 4-5 students. The day with 11 students was a day when the state’s Step Up For Students, which handles the funding for the state’s School Choice scholarship program, conducted a site visit, a visit that Henry knew about ahead of time.
Still, according to the affidavit, the school had 75 students approved by the state as attending, which Henry certified in January.
The affidavit states that the person who conducted the site visit admitted to authorities following the visit that she didn’t see more than 9-10 students. Additionally, she told authorities that “she had significant suspicions that the school was not legitimate” and couldn’t even support 75 students.
According to the affidavit, during the visit, Henry complained about not receiving funds for 25 other students that she should be getting. The affidavit adds those were students who had been attending school in Brooksville last semester and state officials were “very suspicious” of the claim that all of them moved to Lake City.
The timing of approving new students was also suspicious to investigators, according to the affidavit. New students were approved for enrollment often within 10 seconds of their applications being submitted, and included upward of seven children at a time. Those approvals were all done from the same IP address, the records of which show the service location as the same as the school’s address.
Further, the affidavit said that funds from the school’s account were sent to CashApp accounts linked to Henry or her family members.
According to the affidavit, bank records show large cash withdrawals were taking place from the school’s bank account from 2020 through early 2024 to the tune of $686,917.56. Of that, $245,001 was withdrawn in 2023, though investigators were still waiting on records from May through August. The affidavit claims that there’s no logical way to explain the withdrawals if they were being used for “the legitimate operation of the school.”
The affidavit pointed to debits from the accounts being spent on hotel rooms, both local and in Orlando. Funds were also used on fast food, medical bills, hair and nail salons, Sea World tickets and other restaurants in Orlando and Jacksonville that coincide with the hotel stays.
Other items included rented cars from Sunrise Auto Rental in Gainesville. One of those rental vehicles was assigned to Curtis Phillips, which fled the scene of a homicide. Another of the rentals, also assigned to Curtis Phillips, was “acting suspicious trying to elude law enforcement.” In that incident, the vehicle was stopped and amounts of narcotics consistent with sale were found in the vehicle along with an illegally modified firearm.
The affidavit claims those instances coupled with the cash transfers from the school’s accounts to her sons’ accounts would “lead a reasonable person to believe that Tomeka Henry is funding her son’s criminal enterprise…” The affidavit also points to a set of withdrawals totaling $40,000 from Henry to bond her son Samuel out of Columbia County Jail following an Aggravated Battery with a Firearm charge.
There were notes attached to some cash transfers from Henry to others, according to the affidavit. For example, notes such as “loan,” “for you love no pay back,” “don’t ask for anything else,” “diamond,” and ancillary items such as gas and clothes payments are attached to many of the transfers. Florida Statute says that non-profit board members are prohibited from receiving financial disbursements from the corporation. The affidavit claims that there is “no evidence of any employees being paid via traditional methods,” with no checks being written to any employee.
The investigation also found the school didn’t pay any payroll taxes.
The affidavit goes on to list more dubious purchases from the school’s account, including three trips made to Audio Waves in Lake City for the amounts of $1,071.07, $500 and $2,320.52 for installing sound systems in different family vehicles.
In an instance where Henry was accused of paying for local hotel rooms, a sales manager at the Holiday Inn Lake City stated they found it suspicious that Henry rented multiple rooms with no luggage. The manager relayed that they saw several men going into and out of the rooms, using side doors to avoid surveillance cameras. The manager also reported seeing young girls with Henry going into the rooms and estimated their ages to be from 8-9 to 13-14 with the manager suspecting illegal activity occurring. The hotel then stopped allowing Henry to check in for several rooms. Between June 2020 and March 2023, Tomeka Henry rented 96 hotel rooms on 58 dates, paid with the debit card linked to the school’s bank account, and spending $17,264.04.